With a full-time job for a major tech company, a Nordic husband, two children, a house, and many Swedish lessons under her belt, Katthöfer was looking forward to finally becoming a full-fledged citizen.
She met all the requirements. But then the new and stricter citizenship rules came into force on June 6th, and a week later she got the decision from the Migration Agency. Rejected.
"It hurt. I think it's tough, because I've spent the past six years building a life here, and it is home to me, so in some aspect it made me feel as though it's very clear I don't belong here, I'm an outsider – and that hurts because I've done my best to live an orderly life and contribute to society and assimilate," Katthöfer, originally from New York, tells The Local.
When it passed the new citizenship laws this spring, the Swedish government went against the advice of legal experts and its own inquiry and refused to make transitional allowances for the 100,000 applicants already in the Migration Agency's citizenship queue – meaning that if a case officer reviewed someone's application before June 6th, they were assessed under the old rules, but if it was reviewed after June 6th, the same application would be assessed under the new rules.
Katthöfer applied for citizenship over a year ago, but due to the Migration Agency's long and much-criticised processing times (many others in the queue have waited several years), she was one of the unlucky ones who didn't manage to get a decision before June 6th.
She was rejected because she no longer meets the residency requirement – that is the time you must have lived in Sweden before you can become a citizen. In the new reforms, it was increased, in default cases, from five years to eight.
READ ALSO: How long do you have to live in Sweden to become eligible for citizenship?
Ironically, Katthöfer was headhunted to come to Sweden in the first place back in 2020.
"I was working in Germany as a software engineer at the time and gained a sizable following on Twitter. I got a message from an engineering manager who asked if I would be interested in applying for a job in Sweden. I had visited Stockholm once for a few days, and I knew I really liked it, so I said ‘heck yeah, why not'. And I moved myself and my two cats to Stockholm."
Six months in, she met her now-husband.
"We met on Tinder and then talked for hours every day. We were not lagom about anything. We bought a house and had kids pretty quickly," she laughs, now the mother of two.
She explains that her husband was born and raised in Sweden but is actually a Finnish citizen through his mother. Nordic citizens all have roughly equivalent rights and he can live and work freely in Sweden without a permit, so he has never changed his citizenship.
"So my children are Finnish and American citizens, but none of us are Swedish, technically," says Katthöfer, who intends to appeal the rejection, even if it might not lead to anything.
"I felt I had a strong application. I own a house. I am not only full-time employed by a Swedish company with a good salary, but I also have my own business here. I paid a lot of kronor in taxes last year, so I contribute. I've never broken a law in any country. I've evangelised Sweden on Twitter and social media as a really great place to live, especially as someone in the tech industry. So application-wise it was straightforward," she says.
"It was the lack of transitional rules that were the most challenging to wrap my head around. I actually like the idea of having stricter citizenship regulations. I think citizenship is a really special process, it shouldn't be given out so freely. So I think having a longer residency requirement and language and civics test, I think those things are really great," she says.
Katthöfer remembers exactly where she was – on holiday in Italy, standing in a shop in a small town in Tuscany – when she got the news on her phone that the Swedish parliament had almost voted to approve transitional rules before, at the last second, the far-right Sweden Democrats broke a long-standing pairing agreement to win the vote, by quietly sending in two of their MPs who weren't supposed to vote.
"It breaks trust, absolutely, and it begs the question, if one party can get away with going against a pairing-off system for this issue, what prevents a different party from doing it for a different issue? I think Swedish citizens should also be concerned about that," she says.
She emphasises that she thinks an eight-year residency requirement is reasonable, but not to apply that to everybody already in the queue who met the requirement when they paid the application fee and whose applications were only delayed by bureaucracy.
"This is the best place I've lived, and I'm disappointed. I think it changes my trust in the government, and it makes me wonder who really does have my interests at heart as an immigrant who came here to contribute and assimilate," she says.
"I shouldn't speak for the immigration community because I have my own set of circumstances and a lot of privilege, but I think that this is going to tarnish Sweden's reputation with international talent coming here to build some of the big Swedish companies, like Volvo, Spotify or H&M. Sweden was known as a great place to come and live and work and I think that mentality is going to shift a bit."
For many immigrants, and perhaps especially for families which have different nationalities from one another, citizenship offers stability and security, that final assurance that your family will never risk being torn apart because of unexpected immigration red tape.
"Given that I am an immigrant and I have all of my biological family back in the United States, let's say one of my parents got sick and I had to go take care of them. I don't have that option, I couldn't go to the US for a year, because if you're away from Sweden for an extended period of time, you could lose your permanent residency," says Katthöfer.
"I think for me the anxiety becomes that what if for some reason I was not allowed to stay in Sweden. What would I do? My children can live in the United States, my husband can't. So do we move to a third country and start over there? Do I take my kids to the US and leave him here? There's no viable option right now, because we have these split nationalities."
She says most of her Swedish friends and colleagues aren't fully aware of how the tougher migration laws affect immigrants in Sweden, and that many are surprised and outraged when they find out that the new citizenship rules apply to everyone who was already in the queue.
"It's becoming difficult to continually have to advocate for ourselves, because a lot of Swedish citizens are not aware of what's going on," she says. "Having to continually educate folks to spread the word is a bit exhausting. It takes a toll on you mentally. I want to keep supporting this and fighting for my rights, but at the same time, I'm getting tired emotionally."
Several high-skilled foreign professionals have told The Local that they're thinking of leaving Sweden because of the retroactive impact of many of the shifting immigration rules.
But Katthöfer isn't among them. She intends to be here for the long haul.
"When I said this is home, I definitely meant that. I identify myself as someone who has a life here. This is my home and I would be very proud to call myself a Swedish citizen," she says.
"I'm not considering leaving, I'm just entirely disappointed, and I'm hoping that if enough of us can gather our voices together, that someone will hear us and understand that we love it here, that we want to be here and we want to become Swedish in every aspect – and that we can come to some sort of mutual conclusion that benefits everybody."